TBPN Live - Tesla vs SpaceX, Humanoid Robots, Online Dating, Retro Electronics

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You know the problem with those billionaire resorts that everyone goes to? Amman. Amman, yeah. It's like we're the most expensive resort network, basically. Well above the Ritz and the Four Seasons. But there's an obvious problem. They're not venture-backed.

Exactly. It's hard to... You wish you could put more capital into them. Exactly. Because they're so profitable on a per-door basis that I actually think that we need 10 more Amons. We do. And so that gave me an idea.

Hit me. What if we start a venture-backed Amon? That's it. Amon VB. Exactly. A venture-backed.man. That's it. Amman VB. Exactly. Venture-backed. And so the idea is that this is a place where venture investors could get exposure to something that they already know very intimately.

And, of course, when you think about who can run your business better than you, the only person is an investor, a VC. And so during the fundraising process, you let the investors know, like, this is not investor, a VC. And so you – Absolutely. During the fundraising process, you let the investors know, like, this is not your average fundraiser. Like, we are going to want you to dig in. You're going to need to spend 30, 45, 60 nights a year at our properties as part of this investment for free. Yeah, a real operator. Exactly. They like to use that word.

Yeah. Operator gets thrown somebody um i think this guy michael on twitter was talking about vcs use the word operator to embellish their resumes yeah right yeah because it sounds a lot cooler to say i was i'm yeah former operator then yeah i was an associate pm yeah i was a sales guy or yeah i was one of the first like bdr hires at this company operator operator it just sounds like i mean it sounds like special operator twisting the knob yeah you're twisting the knobs but also like maybe you're kicking doors in iraq yeah but in this case it's like yeah there's allocation for you if you commit to acting as

a part-time general manager of the property. Giving feedback, bringing the whole family. Checking guests in and cleaning bathrooms, cleaning up. I mean, really get your hands dirty. You just need to create the flywheel of like, oh, this is the stealthy way to justify even more trips to Amman-like properties with my LP dollars. Yeah, I feel like sometimes venture capitalists, myself included can get a little bit too disconnected from that.

The real asset itself. Yeah. So if you're just lobbing money over, you know, lobbing money over to the founder and they're taking it, they're putting it to the work and they're putting it to work in their business. Yeah.

There's something about getting into the asset and what's a better asset to immerse yourself in than a physical three-dimensional space right this is not software it's true a hotel is a product it's an experience and it's good opportunities because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done at a hotel right vcs aren't necessarily going to add value to a foundation model, right? They don't have the know-how. But when a guest breaks a glass at a restaurant, they know how to use a broom, right? Exactly.

Get in there and clean it up. Do you know the history of Amman? Yeah, so history of Amman. It's fascinating. Yeah, so to my knowledge, it is owned by effectively a Russian oligarch. And when you're staying on an Amman property, you really get that sort of makes sense. I was there, I was at one of their properties last January or this January I guess and there was a lot of Russian being spoken and this is like you know peak Ukraine war so it was interesting sharing you know sharing elevators and hallways and

restaurants with I just love the like the foundation story of the founding story is in 1988 almond resort's first destination was the result of this hotelier the desire to build a holiday home in phuket thailand uh his plans soon developed into an idea to build a small boutique resort with two friends and they invested their own money in the venture as no banks would lend uh for the project due to the small number of planned rooms. The resort opened in 1988 with nightly rates five times higher than local competitors.

They were just like, let's go not 20% higher, but five times higher. And it's actually still pretty much exactly what it's about. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ritz-Carlton runs you at $1,000 a night. $300, $400, $500, yeah. It depends on the resort, but yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Amman can be like $300, $500. No, I think, yeah, the desirable... Especially on the hot nights. Yeah, desirable properties at desirable times of year are like $5,000 for the entry-level room, which is basically as big as our studio. You know, our studio here is significantly yeah larger um then there's

there there is something to that though like the we were talking about this with like um erwan like just going like up market up market like actually giving you but going to play yeah and do something you the death zone is probably 20 exactly just 20 slightly premium slightly premium yeah it was because you can't really afford to do anything fancier so you're just like maybe making a little bit margin it's all this like fake branding whereas yeah like if you if you genuinely have five times higher revenues like there's a lot of interesting things that you can do with that yeah the interesting thing so we stayed there with a couple friends and another couple and they had stayed there before

and so they were just like these are the dates just book it so we booked it and i showed up and i didn't realize till getting onto the property that two full meals a day on on the hotel property or at any of like their 10 partner hotels restaurants were all comped oh everything except alcohol yeah so once you were staying there i was i was like if nobody had mentioned this to me you could have just given me the bill the whole time because you don't go there expecting it was the experience of having like being at an all-inclusive resort sure sure sure and it was sort of funny we were joking around being like could we eat 10 grand worth of Wagyu right now? Because it's technically like all you can eat, right?

I mean, with that price structure, you can't afford not to go. You can't afford not to. Yeah, so I recommend Amman if you're bulking and you want to do a clean bulk. Clean bulk. A Wagyu bulk. A Wagyu bulk. That's what they call it, where you get 90% of your calories from a5 japanese wogger yeah go to state of mon i love it uh did you watch the tesla event of course of course what do you think uh it was a

it was a fountain of virality for me i had two banger tweets come out of it there you go i mean you wish they would hold an event every week exactly i mean it's like it's it's prime for for x content everyone just wants to post about it unfortunately the moment that stands out to me the most aside the visuals of the new technology and stuff are when elon went all right now let's party yeah yeah and then it didn't go or whatever and he was like okay now let's party or let's drink you know it was sort of uh uh the timing was was a little bit awkward for overall like was it i don't know it was strange he seemed do you think it was all the political stuff like he didn't seem he didn't seem locked in.

He certainly wasn't on. I heard someone say like, yeah, his first love is SpaceX. He's like, he's a rocket guy and, and, but Tesla has gotten a lot bigger and he loves the company.

But like, that was the company that he had to, he had to step into and be the CEO and invest in and like save the company and make it work. Whereas like in, in a perfect world, like he would just be spending all his time on space stuff. Cause that's what he was like obsessed with. But, and save the company and make it work. Whereas in a perfect world, he would just be spending all his time on space stuff because that's what he was obsessed with. But I found it very odd that he didn't acknowledge,

and this is something that pretty much all CEOs do, but you could usually get around this, acknowledge the state of the market. There is a very clear bull thesis thesis for the tesla strategy of like not doing what waymo is doing like not doing lidar not starting with limited runs not having expensive you know hardware that that they the company way like waymo owns these vehicles they clean them they have a staff now they might spin that out at some point but right now like the the cost structure is purely internal has Google ever spun out a successful product?

No, this would be the first one. Yeah, so it almost seems like... I'm not even talking about spinning out Waymo as a whole, which I think a lot of people think they should do because it just has a very different economic structure than Google Ads. It's just wildly different. Even if it's going to be a great business, they should split that at some point. But I'm just talking about like,

like the, like they, like they're buying the cars from Jaguar and then they own and operate them. Like you could easily turn this into like a franchise model, right? Eventually. And they might, but not even that, just Elon never articulated this idea that like,

we have more cars on the road than Waymo and we're collecting more data through the cameras and so even though there's yeah in theory much more capital efficient if you don't have to pay to drive around and stuff yeah exactly so he just kind of like threw out like it was like it was almost like it was pointed to the consumers and then the stock sold off but it felt like anybody that's a bear can now easily without any you know real objection from elon go okay so tesla is generally promising what waymo is already doing today yeah not even a tiny scale like they're doing like a hundred thousand rides a day or something yeah yeah it's pretty meaningful. Yeah. And growing exponentially.

Yeah. And the Tesla robo taxi vision still feels like there was no clarity even around dates. And I think that it's sold off because the market is now very much used to Elon putting out dates and timelines that are unachievable in order to push his own team, almost. But the market is basically saying, okay, it's all good if you want to over-promise and push your team internally, but if you're not going to meet the deadlines that... You know, they haven't even... I saw this. I don't think they haven't delivered the roadster, obviously.

And there's still a bunch of people that have paid like they don't sell a convertible right now they don't sell a convertible a full-size suv or a minivan which are like three of the most popular these are like really important segments of the market if you want to dominate i would think i i was i don't know i spent all my time in minivans or convertibles. There's no in between. Yeah, and I wish they'd have a little bit more breadth in there and also just like different designs and stuff. There's a lot. I did like that they were pulling some of the

Cybertruck design. Like the event did look like the future, which I think is good. And I think that he should have stressed that. That it's like these Waymos like are ugly everyone knows that and so him saying like okay one of our principles and our deep beliefs is that like aesthetics matter to these to the success of these projects and then what else matters well scale of the data like yeah like everyone in ai they constantly repeat scale is all you need scale is all you need right like you just need bigger and bigger transformers

bigger and bigger transformers, bigger and bigger LLMs, scrape all the web, get all the video, get all the audio data, compress it down, and then you get magical results. And that's what the true believers in like this end-to-end machine learning like theory around self-driving and what George Hotz is doing at Kama,

like all of that is around this idea that if you just get a ton of data, you won't need any of this crazy, like Waymo famously like hired, they have a cone guy who like just does the software to like identify cones on the road. And like the end-to-end model, it's like, it's as if like, you know, ChatGPT had like, you know, a special guy just for like commas or periods or exclamation points, right? It's like, that's not how it works at all. In fact, they just have the one master model that just looks at the huge soup of like trillions of words. And then, and then it learns all of that

from context, right? And you can learn what a cone is and Tesla's kind of gotten there almost, but they're clearly like, they're being like shortcut right now and there and there was this uncanny valley where like for a while like if you compare gpt1 to just like grammarly or like some rules-based spell check and grammar check the rules-based one would be much better and you'd be like i won, I don't want to feed my English homework through GPT-1. It's going to just hallucinate. Like I remember testing, even GPT-3 when it dropped, I said one of my friends was addicted to this video game,

and I was like, create a 10-step plan for him to quit playing this video game. And it's like step one, step two, and by the end, it was like teaching him to play the game again because it had hallucinated and gone down the end done the opposite because yeah because everything online was like if i can get him to play it again i can get him to quit again and quitting twice is better than quitting one yeah yeah yeah and so and so for when when gpt one two three were out like they were so bad that the rules based like less less full-featured strategies worked. It's funny to think about historically let's say a high school

student is doing their Spanish assignment yeah and the teacher they would use Google Translate and use some sort of exotic string of words that is like way more advanced and the teacher would call it out and be like we haven't ever taught you how to combine these yeah where did you learn it from i think you use google translate whereas now if they use they use like an llm it'll just hallucinate something completely exotic and also very incorrect yeah and because it's more complicated, the students are even less likely to catch it because they're just like... Anyways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So on the data thing, it's interesting to me because Tesla does have more data. They have more cars on the road. They're collecting more data, so they should have more scale eventually. Now, Google does have more compute right now to start, and they also have those crazy like

they're driving all over the world in places where teslas don't even go so they do have like a more exotic data set but yeah going back to your original going back to your original point he had the opportunity to address address the entire world shareholders customers his team the press the media and everything and he flopped on almost all of them even though the technology was so like the like it was almost like a 10 out of 10 visually but then everything else was even even with the the um the human like optimist humanoid robots if he had addressed that and been, and said something along the lines of like, right now there's a human in the loop

and here's how you could apply that, right? You could be 3000 miles away and using an optimist robot to complete complex tasks. And even if you have to step in, you know, one minute out of every hour to do something that's slightly that needs some level of human input it's fine because you get to be in two places at once right and here's the path of how we get these to be fully autonomous but instead it gave ammo to josh wolf and all these other

people online to be like dude you're just like i caught you just yeah i caught you and you're tricking people and you're no better than Trevor Milton or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which ironically is the exact path that Waymo took to teleoperation has been critical in the Waymo rollout. Because, I mean, they had safety drivers in the cars for a long time, which is not even teleoperation. And then still to this day, they have humans over, they're operating at a higher level of abstraction. They're not physically in front of wheels. But they have screens and they're watching all of these.

And if one of the Waymos is in trouble, they can just beam into it immediately and take it over. Yeah, I wonder. And that's a very different model from Tesla. Does the driver, does the passenger know when somebody in a Waymo has beamed in? I don't know. I heard some stats, like one intervention every 17,000 miles or something. So it's pretty rare right now. And obviously that's going to plummet.

But I wonder, and that number might be off. For every one intervention, I wonder how many times where somebody's teleoperating in is like on red alert. Because, you know know it's just like well every time i'm in a waymo some guy and um some guy in india is just like falling asleep at his desk and the alert goes off and he's like i'm in louisiana in a yeah in my way i mean every time i get in a waymo i'm always like break twice if you're teleoperating this right now you know like speak to me through the car um yeah but i actually i have no idea i i don't think that they would want to reveal that i have

always thought that i've always thought that it's it's it's waymo's like ace up their slave because if the fever pitch of like this is too dangerous ever gets really really high they can always pull out and and be like actually there are humans watching everything so there is a human in the loop so it's way less scary and and their ability to like dial that up or dial that down and he's great like a regulatory perspective look at even you know if they had a more clear vision of what this ultimately becomes yeah they could say something along those lines of oh by the way if you want to drive your tesla for 10 hours overnight we can have somebody who's tele operated available interesting to join

you for your journey or whatever i see see i i i disagree with that in the sense that like i i think elon does have a very clear vision, which is no LIDAR, no teleoperation. He's trying to jump straight to the high margin economic model that makes sense in the long term future. And it's just taking him a longer time to ramp up to get there. No, I have no doubt he has a clear vision. But he didn't articulate it. He didn't articulate it. Exactly.

He should have said, look, here. We're sitting here. You're piecing it together. yeah yeah yeah it comes out and he should have just said like look yeah this is a concept car there's no mirrors there's no rear view mirrors on here we probably need to put those on legally but you'll also notice that there are no ugly lidar spinning around on here and that is a decision that we're sticking by and that is that is in some ways why we're behind but why we will be ahead and more profitable in a few years and that's why you should be

excited as an investor yeah but he didn't really acknowledge any of that i do think like some of the distinctions here are important to tell our operation thing like the economic model like the fact that he's trying to sell these like these are all interesting decisions but you have to put them in the context of like what what is actually really happening in the market today? You can't just come out there and act like you're the first person to try and launch this company when there's another company that's actively running. Yeah, and also my,

part of it is he has the biggest audience, direct audience in the world through X. Why would you not do standalone events or do like Tesla week and you have like a different night the optimist is one and because the hard thing is he just kind of like went through it all yeah this is our vision for the future of public transport this our vision for Robo taxi vision for optimus and it was all like you have the resources and the attention in order to you could have done

one event per week for a month and imagine what the stock would have done if he spent the time and you know theoretically spent the time to like lay out an extremely clear vision and treat it as i'm going to give you a master class on our thinking and why we're already ahead in these areas. I think it's usually, I advise like early stage companies to do this. There's a, there's a tendency for companies to try, want to announce a lot of big stuff at once. And it's usually a waste of all of that, those moments to do it all at once when you could spread it out over a month or five weeks and be constantly sort of top of mind and building that sort of cadence with the audience so i think ultimately probably a mistake to just like word vomit yeah major major major announcements yeah

and not give each of them yeah it's interesting i i think he yeah i mean i i think back to like steve jobs announcing the iPhone. Like I'm pretty sure there was a slide in that deck that had pictures of all the other best in class business phones at the time. And they all had keyboards. And he was like, ours will never have a keyboard. Yeah. And I think that distinction, like you could clearly tell that he was calling out BlackBerry directly. Yeah.

And he didn't get sued for that. It wasn't defamation. And Elon seems like more of like a wild man when it comes to communication. And yet he didn't actually articulate, like, is he going to war against Waymo? Does he think Waymo's bad? Like, what are they getting wrong? Yeah, I don't think the average consumer even understands. Hold my hand a little bit on that. Yeah, does the average consumer shareholder understand the difference between LIDAR and the technology Tesla's using?

Yeah, you sent me this Dustin Curtis analysis. The Tesla event could have told a huge inspiring story about the future, explained the philosophy behind what they're building, and then put everything into the context of how human life is going to change for the better. Instead, Musk randomly and briefly showed off a couple of world-changing concept vehicles, casually introduced a humanoid robot, and then threw out some dates and prices

as though he was making them up on the spot. He raised 100 questions, ignored them all, and then, after complaining about parking lots, said he wanted to go party. There was no concept of a bigger plan, not even a cohesive theme. Tesla is doing incredible stuff and changing the world. It's insane to me that they are so bad at telling the story of their work yeah i i kind of agree

with that but i wonder i i do think about it in the context of like imagine jack dorsey announcing all those products like he probably wouldn't be the guy to build any of those products but he would have like even having like slides with a good cadence that he was on and able to just sit up there and i don't know getting the whole world's attention and then just being like that yeah it's interesting to compare with with spacex because like a few days later there's like that amazing uh the the super heavy came down and they caught it with the chopsticks and the mechazilla like structure and that was just a video of the thing actually happening so it was just like yeah they had said it but i don't remember no one remembers like a press conference about that yeah being a plan

like it was like maybe mentioned on podcasts and stuff and then it just happened and it and it was like okay this is just a thing now i guess we're just catching rockets it's like amazing um and like yeah i i think that i mean there isn't much storytelling there but very quickly you can see like oh wow okay if they catch it and it's already on the pad well you're going to be able to refuel it in hours instead of days and so you can send up and if you watch the whole video from that launch, the rocket is only gone for like eight minutes. Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

It just goes up and then it comes back down because it doesn't need to get that high up and it's just boosting it. And then it comes back down. So it's like eight minutes. And so you can see, okay, this is going to get really, really insane when these things are like really pumping. But yeah, like no one's even waiting

for like the next like SpaceX, like, you know, conference. Like it's just like, okay. He's done some of those. Show, not tell. He did the crazy, he did the crazy like point to point one where he was saying that like,

you're going to be able to take a rocket across the country in like, and be from, you know, New York to Tokyo in like 15 minutes or whatever. And now watching them catch the rocket, I'm like, yeah, that's going to happen. and be from New York to Tokyo in 15 minutes or whatever. And now watching them catch the rocket, I'm like, yeah, that's going to happen. For sure.

It might be really expensive, but it seems like it's definitely going to happen. It's interesting because he's deciding how to market both companies. Because the Tesla thing was just marketing. To shareholders, to future customers, fanboys fanboys press it's just marketing yeah the spacex thing is actually not marketing it's just they were just proving that they could do it yeah it's just one step along their journey but it's interesting that you wonder how he treats those two different things if spacex was already public would he have taken a different approach to to that whole event right or does he feel like I don't

need to market anything I'm just doing yeah I mean it is so much more visual watching a rocket land even over a car you know but if Tesla was private right now what do you have done the optimist demo yeah maybe not probably not probably would have just like teller-operated humanoid robots. Because you could just do an investor day for your private investors. You don't need to publicly signal. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

And then the competition is just wildly different. Like, Google is, I mean, there's a lot of, like, you know, problems with the company. It's a little bit old, but it's not Boeing, right? Like, they have, like, some of the best machine learning engineers in the world.

They have a lot of resources. It's still a very young and agile company compared to ULA, like the Lockheed Martin Prime joint venture. Should we move on to, did you read this, The 10 Things That Matter Right Now in Seed VC by Sam Lesson? Oh, yeah. Did you read this? I might have shared this.

Oh, I think one of the reasons I shared this is I think that Slow, Sam, Yoni, Will, all those guys have carved out their own style of content marketing that looks so unprofessional. Which is just them taking notes in their app, screenshotting it, and sharing it. Yeah, it often has the red line underneath. Yeah, it still has the red line. Yeah, it still has the spelling mistake marker. But it works. It just shows that that's how they think.

They have created an incredible magnet for the types of people that they want to meet and doing it in their own way, which is honestly smart because they've realized that the blog in the context of Twitter is almost dead. You can't get visibility on links anymore. And so they're like, okay, we're just going to screenshot it yeah and then and then i would say that overall none of them are super savvy around brand and design and stuff like that and they wouldn't pretend to be but they've carved out their own like very like distinct thing where you see a bare screenshot and it's on a pretty good cadence i feel like there's always something happening yeah yeah yeah it's

like you get a screenshot essay like every every couple weeks or every month like there's always something happening yeah yeah yeah it's like you get a screenshot essay like every every couple weeks or every month and it's always like just near the frontier of the discussion which i think is good it's kind of interesting did anything jump out for me to you like in the actual piece uh you know i think a lot of this stuff is good marketers tend to get a number of good ideas and then just keep repeating them over and over and over. So I think this is a summary of their broader theses that they've had on seed investing for a long time and really trying to brand themselves as seed investors, even though they have you know pretty solid aum yeah um yeah i mean i think going going down the list list following the shift in focus uh to great entrepreneurs i think people are realizing that it's hard to build iconic companies by just having a good idea and the right timing and even a lot of capital i think that's one um what about the one about about like the next generation of like gen

z founders being disillusioned by the fundraising treadmill wanting cash flow profitability these types of things like more like a rebranding of the lifestyle business and like it seems like he's thinking about that more and and seeing like okay it's possible that the next amazing venture-backed founder just doesn't really get on the venture treadmill and that could be rough for my business and he's kind of like processing that but that's what i took away from it yeah i think that how real it is though but they've been and I know this from hearing it directly from founders that they've recently backed, where they are pretty upfront with their founders, where they don't care which path their companies try to take. I think it's just about this general encouragement that capital efficiency is cool bryce from adbc is doing something similar right yeah yeah it's okay if this is your last round he's been on that yeah

he's been on that forever and even if you talk to bryce he's not against venture capital no i think that the he just doesn't want to wind up with a thing where half the portfolio is like completely faking it just to get to the next round to like scale up and then they wind up as zombie corns yeah the thing that i talk the thing that i feel like comes up a lot when i'm talking to companies is it's the stupidest thing in the world to go start a fundraise or to ever in your business be like we're never we're only going to finance our business this one time yeah that's the last time yeah it's like nobody every business that is enduring uses financial instruments at different points in their life cycle for different reasons it might be for inventory yeah yeah apple's issuing bonds they have a hundred billion dollars in cash yeah so so so you coming out i don't give anyone any points at all for being like, oh, yeah, we're never raising again.

It's like that honestly is it shows a kind of general scarcity mindset and fear of dilution. Or it honestly makes if when I hear a founder go, I never want to raise again. All I hear is I want to own 45% of my company forever. Yeah. You know, like, because. Well, it's not just that it's like the, the decision to pick a particular financial instrument should be driven by the dynamics of the market and the business. And, and, you know, whether you have, do you have an insane amount of really valuable R and D expense that's going to get paid back a thousandfold when you have a monopoly on whatever?

Well, obviously venture capital is perfect. Or is it just OPEX and marketing dollars? Maybe that should be financed with debt. Or is it inventory or CapEx? Pick the financial instrument that's correct for your business. When you say, I don't want to raise more money, that's different from saying, oh, I actually understand this industry really well.

I understand my business and how we fit into the industry. And because of the way we're operating, venture capital is not the right fit for us at this scale. So instead we are financing the business this way or this way or that way. But coming into it as being like, okay, step one, I'm going to write off one particular financial instrument. And then step one, I'm going to like write off one particular financial instrument.

And then step two, I'm going to, you know, build whatever and maybe it aligns with that. Or the even worse is I don't like fundraising. So we're just going to raise it. I'm like the skillset needed to raise money is the same skillset needed to find and close customers customers hire great people and there's a lot of people that benefit will be better fundraisers if they just have a phenomenal business but but yeah i think i think it's been an interesting you can tell you can learn a lot

about a founder by how when a vc goes out and is like it's okay to tell us that you only want to raise one round, like how they react to that tells you everything about their ambitions. Yeah. And what they're optimizing for, right? And how much they understand their business in the market. I think like these, yeah, there's this like general fear of dilution

because there's all these horror stories of companies going public. Google didn't need to raise that much money. They IPO'd pretty profitably very early. Yeah. Yet they still use the public markets to raise. Yeah. But they did stop raising money pretty early.

Yeah. But it wasn't because they were like, fuck you VCs. I don't like venture capital. It was because it was like, OK, this is actually a profitable business built on top of, and there's a monopoly power here, and there's scale, and it's not as essential that we just raise and raise and raise. Versus, I don't know,

you look at the money pit that has been the virtual reality saga at Meta. It's a huge investment, tens of billions of dollars, but if it pays off, it's really big. That's obviously a good use for, like, burning cash. And then there's plenty of other examples where, you know, SpaceX has raised a lot of money, burnt a lot of money. But it's paying off now that they have a SpaceX mount. Starlink's doing so well.

And so it's like, yeah, it's just, like, very, very dependent on the particular business. Yeah, I think it's better for founders to say, here's how much money I need to hit these milestones. And as CEO of the company, my job is to make the price per share go up continuously. And if there's opportunities where I can take on capital and increase the rate of increase in the value of the shares then I'll repeatedly do that yeah yeah because that's the thing about dilution is nobody's clawing back your shares it's simply that you're increasing the number of shares but it just make

the share price go up more yeah it's simple yeah yeah. If you're doing your job, it's all a creed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so anyways, I think... Well, here's another one. Another screenshot. I think this is from Yoni. This is... So Yoni,

he's at SLO, right? Yeah. He wrote a screenshot essay about the bull case for OpenAI and then Eric Newcomer wrote a piece about the bear case for OpenAI.

I don't know if they were... I don't know who was responding to who here but or if they were even or just two guys shouting into the void yeah maybe maybe but um but but I thought they were interesting and I think you know we've talked about open AI and the and the price um uh a few times but I think that there's a lot of other stuff going on in AI that we should talk about specifically the the energy stuff that's going on downstream of all that and then a little bit of like um you know how like kind of the knock-on effects from like the big deals like um there's there's like i think we're going to see a lot of notebook lm type startups and then we're also going to see a lot of the power generation companies shift into ai driven narratives

already we're already seeing this like this kairos power company um just did a huge deal with google to generate seven new nuclear reactors it's pretty crazy the irony of woke google employees having to realize that oh nuclear is actually kind of makes sense. I don't know if they ever had a problem with it. I think it was always like oil and gas. Yeah. I think the anti-nuclear stuff was like, it was like the version of woke from like the 70s. Like post like Cuban Missile Crisis.

But in the modern era, like most like, you know, Google employees are probably pretty pro-nuclear. It's not as heretical as people think. It's been pretty mainstream. It's certainly mainstream right now. But I think the other real factor is Google and the other hyperscalers have all committed to big ESG commitments to be net zero. So they did a lot of work to build out renewable energy sources for their existing data centers which was fine when they were just serving ads and it wasn't that intense and now they're like okay we need to 10x our energy budget as we go into like the ai era and how are we going to do that without

burning fossil fuels a lot of a lot of uh you know ai folks are worried about that and we talked about this last time like xai is just like they're pulling from everywhere they're they're burning natural gas but then they're also pulling from the grid and they're doing solar and they're just doing everything they can possibly do what's mark you remember when mark was uh tweet sending pro fracking tweets which one mark mark mark andreessen andreessen oh yeah it was only like two years ago it was like drill frack yeah yeah something like that well yeah i i have this i have this interesting theory that like if we had a if we had a president in the turn of the millennium like instead of bush you had someone who who was very in tune with the technology community.

We never would have gone to war in the Middle East because – War in the Middle East was never about energy. You don't think so? But that's not a topic for – But because, like, at least at the time, there was, like, this big narrative, like, oh, we're going there for oil. Yeah. But what actually wound up happening? Well, like,ica didn't really get that much oil from the middle east that's that's not the the end conclusion of the wars in the middle east and the fracking

innovation led to energy independence so like the technology was there the whole time yeah it just wasn't recognized and so it's potentially it's at least at least one possible narrative is like uh an ignorance of technology backed us into a corner that led to more international aggression. Potentially. Anyway, good time to be an energy company because the tech companies are going after you. So I do think one thing is I had a thesis for a while that a lot of the anti-oil movement was funded by. Like there's a scenario where the GCC, the Gulf, you know, countries, kingdoms, whatever you want to call them there's a scenario where they're like hey what if we spent 100 million dollars a year campaigning against oil to discourage people from investing in oil production right and to discourage young people because like for example do you know a single person that works in oil and gas no and that's insane. We know like I know people in pretty much every single industry.

I know one guy who who has a small like S&B oil drilling. There's something related to that. Something related to that. I know one guy. Yeah. And if you go back 30 years ago and you asked how many of your friends work in oil and gas, it would probably be within our networks or the kind of network that we might have had 30 years ago, there probably would have been 20, 25% of people were like, yeah, I work in oil and gas. Because it's just such a massive industry. Even just a couple of years ago,

I didn't know anyone who worked in energy, period. And now I know nuclear and solar founders. But for a long time, and still- Yeah, we know more nuclear. We know way more nuclear and solar founders, but for a long time and yeah, we know more nuclear. We know we know way more nuclear and solar people, but they are not generating a lot of power yet. They're still in the scale. So here's here's the the the theory that the very insane tinfoil hat theory of mine is that if you spent one hundred million dollars a year campaigning against how bad oil is you could probably have that you could

probably prevent billions and billions and billions of billions of supply from coming online because it's just discouraging people from going and saying sure oh I'm gonna buy this piece of land and I'm gonna start fracking right yeah it's just like a part of sort of – it never – people didn't even think – most people in our generation weren't thinking, oh, wait, oil is like the most in-demand substance in the entire world. It is a massive industry. I should just go do that, you know?

So anyways. Well, yeah, I mean we know Isaiah at a velar he's going into oil and gas basically but through a renewable pathway which is a little bit different what else should we do in in AI Tyler Cowen was on a podcast he he's he says that in the air in the era of AI AI, everyone needs to up their networking game because relationships, and he even said improve your physical presence, which I think was sick.

Your aura? I don't know if it was aura, but it sounded like get jacked. Likeability is going to matter. Likeability and connections and personal relationships are going to be... Senra is one of his probably top three learnings from studying history's great entrepreneurs is that relationships run the world. Yep.

So that tracks. Yep. Cohen. I heard an interview with a guy who spent something like a couple hundred million dollars on a mega yacht and the operating expenses on a mega yacht are something like 10 annually so it's like a 10 to 20 million dollar like money sink and he said but if i do one deal on this boat it'll pay for the whole thing there you go it's amazing that's the the logic everybody needs to be applying to it should i go to arowan right now well if i meet one person if i meet one influencer that

that posts about my cbd toothpaste brand it'll pay for all my smoothies for the whole year yeah i mean the sad thing is like there is like the d-gen version of that which is like going to the club and like getting hammered like you know it's like not good um or the yeah the notebook lm we already talked about that i actually met i met one of the designers from i mean lm last night oh really yeah and he was like imagine having i think it's like a six or seven person team at google that created it yeah and i was talking with another founder that I invested in. Is he going to spin out and raise money? No, I don't think that's how it works.

No, no. But like, I mean, he can just quit and build something competitive. Yeah. No, I think it's probably a higher ROI for him to stay within Google and be the creator of a hot new thing. Because apparently, because think about it. When I think Google tv started as like a five to ten person project internally google tv um i've never heard that you mean youtube no google had uh fire stick i think it no that's amazon yeah amazon fire stick google had a tv

product chromecast chromecast but it was, no, they have some. Oh, yeah, you can, like, watch baseball on YouTube TV. Yeah, so Google TV started as, like, a five- to ten-person project internally, and a founder that I back was on that original team, and it went within two years, was a 500-person organization. So this guy from Notebook.com is, guy from He could go from being yeah, you know on this tiny team to a hyperscaler sure within Yeah, tiny and then you choose and I'm sure there's a lot of comp but talking about the the value of relationships in the AI era Who was it Brett

What's his last name the He's been at Twitter. He just raised a $4 billion valuation for an AI agent startup. Oh, yeah, that was a good... Why can't I think of his name? He's on the board of OpenAI, wasn't he? I forget. Brett Taylor? Yeah, he's been the CTO of Meta

and a bunch of companies. He's like, there is no technical moat deep enough to justify a $4 billion valuation for an AI agent startup. It's based on Brett's ability to cross-sell to everyone in his contact list, get to $450 million ARR, and sell for $10 billion to Amazon in 36 months. Very real. That's going to be a quote tweet in 18 months.

Yeah. Should we do brother of the week? Brother of the week. Where to start? do brother of the week brother of the week where to start technology brother of the week but first i need to tell you about patek philippe when it comes to luxury timepieces there's one name that stands above the rest patek philippe since 1839 they've been crafting some of the world's most exquisite watches each one a masterpiece of design precision and heritage now patek philippe isn't about telling time. It's about owning a piece of history, a tradition passed down from generation to generation. These watches are meticulously handcrafted by some of the world's finest artisans. They represent more than luxury. They symbolize craftsmanship and timeless

innovation. So if you're thinking about an heirloom piece or just looking to make an investment in your own style, there's no better choice than Patek Philippe. Visit patek.com to discover the collection. Patek Philippe, you never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. Tell a personal story about your family traditions. Yeah, I didn't come from, I actually don't really have that many family traditions, but you know.

Patek is one. Well, it will be. And see, that's the thing is that there's this you know famous proverb the best day to plant a tree is you know 20 years ago the second best day is today and you can just start family traditions and as soon as you start them they can become family traditions if in my eyes family traditions that stimulate the economy naturally. Since the economy is good, it's naturally better to choose family traditions that require capital expenditure. Investment, sure. In order to stimulate the economy so that the economy improves and naturally everybody benefits. Everybody benefits, right? So it's a family tradition that your own internal family can cherish

and sort of carry on throughout generations, but then also hope that you would want your family traditions to benefit the world. Yeah. Stimulating the economy benefits everybody. Yeah, I really do think that exercise for the listener, if you don't come from a family that has a lot of crazy traditions, like start one today. Start one. Start one. Yeah. I think that's great. So onto Technology Brother of the Week, you flagged this guy. I actually don't even have his handle here. Maybe we should do someone else. Oh, well, there's actually two people in the running. So that's number one. This guy, he made this brave video.

He decided as Hurricane Milton was approaching his condo, he decided to stay with all of his supercars and stay at his condo with all of his supercars, not evacuate. And it was because all because of sports betting and his success with sports betting that you know he's willing to risk it all because he knows he can just if he even if he loses everything he can just start sports betting again yeah and make it all back in you know 48 hours something like that right all you're only you're only three individual parlays away from generational wealth.

And so I think he's trying to, he might have been using this opportunity to sell a course, but I think there's this broader, there's really a broader story here, which is like, if you become the type of person that's worth $100 million, you can make that $100 million in a multitude of ways, a multitude of times.

This is just. Well, the reason that I think he's a technology brother is that this is only possible in the modern era using the latest and greatest technology. He has a generator and Starlink, so that even when the power goes down, the internet goes out from the hurricane, he can continue to sports bet.

Yeah, the games are not going to stop. Exactly. You can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis futures. Exactly. The outcome of a cricket game. Right, right yeah what's happening in the soccer world yeah and i would hope that if somebody's in india you know eventually getting

you know approached by some storm that they would be making betting on dolphins bets on you know stuff that's happening here right exactly exactly so he has some stiff competition uh we got ryan salame the former co-ceo of ftx who's reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and a half years on campaign finance fraud charges posted this on linkedin on linkedin today i'm happy to share that i'm starting a new position as inmate at fci cumberland who do you give it to between these two? Posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic. Does it deserve Technology Brother of the Week though? I think we got to save Brother of the Week when he comes back and starts a

world positive venture. Here we go. Announces that you know hopefully you know generates billions of dollars in returns for shareholders and uses that to sort of pay back the victims of ftx i think brother of the week has to go to this guy okay we'll put his name up and we'll link the video cole house and cole house and you're officially the brother of the week one of the first brothers of the week okay um and hopefully he's still alive yeah because there's small chance that he didn't make it if he is alive if he is alive we know that he's still selling courses and encouraging other people to follow suit so yeah um what do you think of this concept there's a company called Back Market that is selling older technology

and encouraging you to downgrade. So they're reintroducing the iPhone 6S SE 11, 12, 13, mini, 14, refurbished. And they're also selling what looks like an old Sony HD Handycam, camcorder. And Tyler here says, fascinating concept and really good name. Imagine something similar may happen with software. What's your reaction?

I mean, this is a phenomenally viral, 50,000 likes on this. There is serious demand for nostalgic tech. It was shocking. I mean, it's a great ad. This goes into almost every technology consumer tech product has been over-engineered. All I want is for Sonos to release a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync four different speakers

and spend an hour and a half setting it up. And then right as I'm having people over, two of the speakers get disconnected. And I'm just like, could I just run an extension cord between all of these and just let them run, right? So I think things have been over-engineered. You're seeing this in ultra-luxury cars

that almost all the most, I think we've maybe even talked about this, going back to analog, Bugattis intentionally have these very tactile switches. The Utopia. I think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle Craigslist and unbundle eBay,

there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses. So Bezel is a company I back that's like the stock X of watches. Right now eBay is still the number one seller of luxury watches online. The issue with eBay is you could spend $20,000 on a Patek. Actually, not going to get the kind of Pateks we like for $20,000. But let's say you want to spend $60,000 on a Patek, actually not going to get the kind of Pateks we like for $20,000, but let's say you want to spend $60,000 on a Patek, if there's a 25% chance that it's fake, that's not really a risk that anybody should take.

And so they took what eBay did well already, which was having a lot of inventory, and added authentication. And the same thing is what rent the runway to this as well you if you're buying a two thousand dollar vintage chanel jacket cars and bids yeah same thing i mean yeah bring a trailer similar like disaggregate because ebay motors really was big but people peeling this stuff off and adding like specific features yep um so yeah i think i think as long as until something like a backtrack or bezel truly become dominant there's still these opportunities to like unbundle so what do you think is more viral about this i mean i don't even know if this is their launch but it's clearly their introduction to you know a million views and

50 000 fans yeah do you think Do you think the concept is more viral or the execution in the sense that it's like great copywriting on a subway and then someone wound up just taking a photo because it's a subway ad. Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the IRL, but maybe... It's probably paid for itself.

What's funny is I looked at this ad and I was like, that's so cool. Like just great campaign. and then i went to the website and it was a bunch of vintage electronics and i was like yeah i haven't been back since yeah yeah but um but i think this is a good example of just the power of branding and like a really good marketing campaign who knows if it'll make it an enduring business but my worry with this stuff is like a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances. And it's this, the car world is talking about this, how like, you know,

would you ever want an earlier Model 3 or would you always just want the latest Tesla Model 3? Like you would always just want the latest one because it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone. There's no real benefit to downgrading as opposed to the old cars where it's like oh yeah like a lamborghini countach is going to drive in a very specific way that like yeah the issue is you can sell the device but you still don't really control the software yeah apple can be like we don't support this anymore or just doesn't run that well yeah they'll force you to upgrade but it runs terribly yeah and so i think what would be an incredible product and i don't even know if it's possible to deliver at scale

is if you could actually go back and run like ios 4 on an og iphone and it would just be so fun i mean you can get the very first iphone they're getting expensive now but it doesn't have an app store no that's a whole it just comes with what it has you get maps you know like just buying apple apple products when they release and leaving them in the box is like the best performing asset class i don't know best performance yeah you know maybe it's not nvidia but like it outperforms like yeah yeah they grow eventually yeah yeah so anyways good example of a good campaign and how there's not, you know, it's not too late to unbundle these behemoths. Yeah. In terms of the other kind of like trad technology, we got to go back. Huge, huge push against online dating recently. Have you been following this?

Oh, yeah. online dating recently have you been following this oh yeah so it is so somebody showed this chart of how couples meet in the united states and the online is just a rocket ship from 1990 where it's basically zero to 2020 when it's well over 50 now there is a community note on this that's not it's not live but i clicked on it because i can see what's in there power yeah and and somebody was trying to you know fight it out in the community notes, claiming that, oh, well, this cuts off right during COVID. Maybe it's gone down. And then they cite some other study that was done by Zola, the wedding registry.

So they poll people, and it said that now Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school and I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection and I think people doing weather industries on Zola is specific so this is this is a survey of of like 6,500 people randomly by some academics and and Zola is like a very specific subset where they're like just polling their users yeah and so I imagine that if you're going And Zola is a very specific subset where they're just polling their users. And so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing this elaborate registry,

you're probably higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in an IRL setting as opposed to online. And so I disapprove of that community note. I think everybody can be bearish on on everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that cigarettes are bad yeah but you're not gonna you know until there's something better comes along well i don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex which is the primary human motivation so you're just not gonna if as long as these apps

are able to offer what they're offering they're only going to become like it's interesting that it does seem that it does seem that people are like our society is now very like from a dating standpoint dating apps are driving the majority of connections like that kind of seems like it's a thing uh yet people are not people can overcome the addiction the only thing more powerful than the drive to just like meet whatever for people to meet the opposite sex seemingly is finding your person and like you end up giving these people end up giving up the app afterwards right so thankfully the positive is that that it seems like you know finding your life partner wife husband whatever uh seems to get people to quit these things so they're you can't really

say that they're addictive even though they're they're dominant right i did i did have something funny so monday i was catching up with a buddy who started started a couple different companies with a certain tech billionaire and he was telling me that said tech billionaire is, desperately wants to fund a new version of Seeking Arrangements, which is like the sort of high end, you know, like sugar daddy, like specific dating app. So maybe a contrarian move on his part. But why, like, is there a problem with Seeking Arrangements?

I'm assuming, I'm assuming. Just like he thinks it's a good business. Well, I'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like, this is bad. We need to make it better. So he wants to accelerate sugar baby relationships. I don't even know how the economics work on there. It doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because that's the beauty of the OnlyFans

business is that they're taking a cut of the entire like economy between the simps and the women yeah but it's hard if it's just if there's if there's potential for disintermediation yeah but it's still fundamentally only fans model is that they never meet in person and so it's always intermediated by a platform that can take a fee and that's why they're so insanely profitable yeah what do you think of the idea of if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates, he should purchase Match Group, the company that controls Tinder and Hinge, over half of the online dating market? Make a bunch of changes. So Elon's a capitalist. I don't think he's fundamentally even x yeah x yeah he purchased it to defend free speech but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his trillions of dollars of companies right so

it's like it's hard to argue that even and also he can he can he has a great position to take which is oh i didn't buy this to make money. I don't care. I'm sure he'll take it public again someday. He could take it public at a loss and say, look, I did this for free speech or whatever. But let's face it, he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him. And he could lose $10 billion on x and make it back 10x over with spacex or tesla or whatever so it's not a i don't think he's gonna he's not the guy who honestly if he bought match group and was like i'm gonna re-engineer this to try to increase the

birth rate and everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would would destroy enterprise value yeah because of course these of course the incentives are set up in a way all the way from the ceo to the the of match to the individual leaders of their different brands all the way down to the lowly product manager who's just like fuck i just want to increase dau's just 10 percent like that'll get me my next you know raise or whatever then i can go from associate to include increase the ctr on this one button yeah yeah yeah yeah so anyways uh match group is but it's it's funny because it's everybody wants to say that match group is all bad yet there's millions of couples out there that would

never have met yeah and their lives are completely yeah like better because match group products exist of course yeah so it's one of those things like nothing is ever as good or as bad the other yeah the other interesting thing is like like you know even even if match group was in like the uh you know charitable let's call it like a charitable donation range like let's say it was like a 10 million dollar company but it still had the outsized effect that it has on society. Like Elon could just be like, I'm going to burn $10 million because I feel like changing the world.

$10 million. Let's call it $10 million. Like super low, like nothing. It's a rounding error for him. So he buys it, he shuts it down. Well, like that's not going to stop someone else coming in and doing the same thing. It doesn't work like that.

There's clearly some sort of market demand here and you can't just like uh you can't just go around doing like this this like odd brand of like capitalism philanthropy mix like like yeah i i think the solution here i do think people are clamoring for a solution to like plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates. But the answer is... Don't go after the apps. Yeah, yeah. You actually need to build a better cultural institution and figure out how that can scale and be profitable. You need to make it punishable by jail

if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them. In real life. In real life. Like if a guy like if a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking this is a cute girl and doesn't say hello i'd like to take you out to coffee that can be punishable by up to 10 years i don't know if the government's gonna solve this yeah i think we're looking for free market solutions here and the free market solutions are probably like someone going and building something that's a that

that's a really cool like i heard one person pitch uh this is kind of a wild idea crossfit for militias so the idea is like if you want if you want strong militias in america which maybe you don't but if you do and you the, you want the ability of like, like local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in, you have such an organization. You could do the same thing where it's like, you know,

some sort of new CrossFit community, something like that, where it's like, it's, it's a scalable organization, but it's about something else where people can meet and bond. No, I want to fund discord for local militias.

Discord for local militias. Just vertical SaaS for militias. I don't even know if there are that many militias around. No, but we need to stimulate more. Okay, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so, yeah, if you could manage everything from communication to inventory to recruiting to dues to training to compliance yeah there's a big business to be built there i mean i do love the idea and my dad group chat in the neighborhood are all early users

and yeah and you even link it into you know scrape uh active you know police reports warnings you bring in data so it's basically like you know getting you know you get a push notification and then you like rip your suit off and underneath this is like full you know military i think dudes would sign up for it i do like the idea of you know like okay we're revitalizing like the american military and working with the dod with all these defense tech companies but like what happens if we get overrun and like you know some foreign country is like on our shores like we need militias and we just need to we need our own insurgency and we need to be prepared for that I mean fortunately I have the most guns of any country so shouldn't should be going back to that Going back to the fixing, the reason that I don't think dating, I only think it's going to get,

I don't think it's going to get better, really. I think the future that we're seeing today, which is hyper-financialized dating, which is you're on this app and if you pay more money like you can have better odds at success and all this stuff but then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in you know texas would date somebody in ohio and then like form a relationship that way but the issue is that historically humans had i think it was there's

some data on on until recently or until the last couple of decades, most people that got married were born within like five square miles of each other or something like that. Yeah. And that was actually positive in that people would look around and see and just like be more committal because they're like, well, this is the best person for me in my neighborhood. Yeah. Right. Or my city or whatever my wife like super easy yeah just like oh like family's here everything's here i guess we should get married yeah um so yeah i think that the era of optionality seeing seeing the entire pool across yeah and it doesn't even matter because the thing is is somebody's using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop using dating apps They're still gonna go on Instagram and see the same number So eliminating even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever

It's not gonna stop and Instagram is the bigger that isn't interesting like obviously I want the free market solution here but it would be interesting if like like legally you couldn't have a you had to have some geo restriction on uh on on the matching yeah or it's like you can only get you can only get five matches a month yeah something like that yeah we're limiting matches i don't think that's what's ever gonna happen no yeah that's right i just i think whatever you're seeing today is what exactly what you're going to see for the most part. The relentless march of tech capital. Yeah. Even the even the present prevalence of I don't know if this made it in the stack, but there was somebody tweeted.

I think it was like on the character. I read it and it was like so long. Their favorite character that they were chatting to. I finally met someone. Thanks for thanks for teaching me how to talk to a woman. It certainly helped. So that's, I guess, one positive. Yeah. Yeah. It's like if if if the sort of incel audience is chatting with these bots and they're like, damn i low-key have game right yeah yeah i have thought about that where is this maybe maybe there's a scenario where it's like you like a boy is talking to an ai girlfriend and and a girl out there is talking to an ai boyfriend and because they're on the same

platform the the two ais you can kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data to know because you know every interest about the boy because you've collected you know hours and hours of communication and you've connected hours and hours of chat logs with the girl as well and you can look across the network and say wow these two people are actually perfect matches we should just inter introduce them and disintermediate and then the ai has to and then the and then the real life boy and girl meet and they're like wow it feels like i'm talking to the ai boyfriend or ai girlfriend that i've been talking to you for the last year i'm glad i gave it so much training data and then they meet up and it's a catfish

i've been leading my you're talking to the ai girlfriend you're like yeah i'm i'm jacked like i can bench 400 yeah it's like oh well like we have a girl over here who wants to date someone who's who could bench 400 why you have to post proof right yeah yeah yeah exactly unfortunately unfortunately we've had issues on the platform with people people embellish their bench uh one rep max. And we actually will need you to post proof of it. Make sure you're in a well-lit area that's clearly not using fake weights. That's funny.

I want to talk about this, like, you know, zombie corns, dead venture companies. So it started with this tweet by Tara, or Tara, very surprised at the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised it too high of valuations and are now in a state of purgatory. And I think you know this guy, Siva, is that right?

Or you just saw him? But he says, he says, DM or email me we've bought a few companies that raged 50 to 100 million dollars from vc and we're stuck behind a large pref stack i've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to no upside is exhausting and demotivating we can provide a landing spot for your company in a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd like to do other things this is my bad signal to founders or investors that see founders stuck in these situations so yeah so who's Zerp companies that yeah so the irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company for like a big outcome oh really

yeah like that like she had a really successful exit and then it catalyzed a bunch of people well i'd be like oh how do i actually i actually don't know the details but i think people did very well okay i saw like employees tweeting that were like whoa i'm rich now okay cool stuff like that so she has a big outcome bunch of people are like whoa how do i do that how do you sell your company yeah um because people still have this perception that i don't know a lot of venture- venture backed founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised at, even if they're not, or even, even their seed valuation and that's, you know, whatever. So, but what I think is funny is,

is you have these people. Um, so Jeremy Gaffon was probably over a year ago, maybe at this point, he goes on invest like the best he starts talking about special situations everybody's like whoa you've been doing like and he's giving examples of deals that they've done at tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business and he's calling them like log jams and special situations where he's coming in as a somewhat neutral third party saying, like, how do we deliver what everybody wants? The VC wants oftentimes to just, like, take a write-off or clean it up or stop having to spend any time on it if they're on the board.

They don't want to deal with it anymore if it's not going to return their fund. So he's solving that for the VCs. He's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and whatever the core team is that allows them to save face and hopefully see some ROI or walk away entirely if they want to do something else. But I think it's funny because now you have Jeremy, who has his new fund, who's fully focused on this. So you have to imagine he's going to be ahead of a lot of these other people that are coming out and now trying to compete here. But Jeremy is competing with Tiny Capital, Andrew Wilkinson, who's still trying to do the same deals. You know, even though, to my knowledge, Jeremy was the guy like really leading the charge of that practice.

And so all of these guys who are running holding companies are basically now like doing like distressed finance, you know, just coming in, like trying to find value and unfuck these situations. So anyways, I think it's great that these these players exist in the space. It's generally positive, I think, for pretty much all the stakeholders but the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is going to make i'm at the increased competition we'll see if it if um i don't know if the venture industry has could support as many of these types of players as they can microphones right yeah i. I wonder what the wheelhouse deal looks like for, like where is their value when there's a log jammed like B2B SaaS company?

Because I feel like if you raise a ton of money, you didn't get to product market fit, but you're in the last era. It's like, okay, well, you probably aren't doing like a AI first approach. You're probably doing something else. Maybe you have some customer list. It's like I struggle to think of like why I personally would want to own one of these companies.

But yeah. So imagine a company that raised $25 million and gets to $5 million of ARR. Sure. And they're not profitable. In fact, they're burning a lot of money, and they stop growing. Suddenly, companies that don't make money and are not growing are worthless, especially if they're losing money. And so you take one of these $5 million ARR businesses that's not really growing anymore.

And if you wipe out the pref stack, massively decrease costs, focus on sustainable growth, you could probably sell that business for twenty five million dollars in like three to five years. Right. I'm just saying like maybe. Yeah, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying without without any more without like putting up significant more capital, that feels hard. Not necessarily, though. Maybe if you're plugging into something that has heavy synergies, sure, it's like, okay, they have a product that we can cross-sell or something. I'm not saying it's easy. But I'm just saying if you have a $5 million AR business with a $25 million pref stack that's not growing, If you wipe out the pref stack, reduce costs,

and find a way to grow sustainably, and then you get profitable. And then in five years, you go to a strategic and you say like, hey, you guys should actually buy this for $50 million because it's accretive to your business. The person that bought the business for five, whatever, if you paid $5 million for it, you're going to do great. So that's why all

these people are circling being like hmm yeah like yeah i really want to see the the the like the histogram it's actually it's actually good to give vcs love to add value via intros yeah and so siva and jeremy and andrew are all going to be pretty much... Buddy-buddy with all the VCs. Yeah, getting those calls and intros. Hey, you guys should talk. You should talk to this one. Yeah.

I just wonder on the histogram how much capital is going into each deal. Is there any other structure? Is it just... Well, yeah, the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt. If you're buying a business, there's totally possible

you could buy a business with $5 million of ARR for $2 million of cash, $3 million of debt, and if you sell the business for $25 million, it's a pretty good multiple on your cash. It is kind of high stakes. It's kind of high stakes because you've got to cut costs fast to pay for the debt and then you've now cut costs and now you have to grow while maintaining margins in this new era

because you're not like this hot company trading at some premium. Everyone knows you're like this turn around. It's tricky. I like it though, because it's a simple it's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility. Yeah, because Jeremy's done a bunch of these deals. Yeah, I don't know.

It doesn't seem like that simple of a strategy. More seems like something that Jeremy is really good at. Simple fund these fund these. You sure, sure, sure. Very difficult to execute sure very difficult to execute yeah yeah but it's important it's much worse to have a very complex fun thesis yeah and a very complex execution sure sure sure at least have one of them be simple yeah yeah one of them complicated yeah um so yeah because I don't know. There's just not that many. Nobody right now, nobody wants to buy a business that's, for the most part, it's not that strategic to buy. If you have a company that's working, it's not that strategic to buy a cost center.

But if you can turn it into like a profit center and something that's accretive. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually going to go on. The what? I wonder how much hack and slash is actually going to go on in those deals.

Like Twitter is kind of the famous example of a really bloated company, 5,000 employees. It's now below 2,000. It's getting closer to a thousand like that is remarkable but yeah when i'm thinking about a 25 million dollar raise it's like well maybe they got to what 50 employees so they could go down to 10 could they go down to 20 like maybe yeah like that doesn't seem like the hard thing is if you're going after these sas companies consumer apps or whatever they are, you're still at $5 million of revenue and trying to be super capital efficient. Yeah. You're still threatened by all the next YC batch.

Exactly. We're building SaaS for, you know. With AI. With AI. It's like the next hot thing. They're going to burn money to like acquire those same customers. That is really tough. Yeah.

But if you've found some niche and like the revenues are pretty strong yeah sticking around it's just interesting there's the um the startup community generally has this attitude that anything's possible yeah and when they think of private equity they're like oh yeah you just buy companies for one price and sell them for more and like look at this deal like what if you did that with this whatever um but private equity credit to the gentlemen that we know in that industry like they are not there's not a lot of efficiencies that you can get in private equity the edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to founders,

and that's why this content marketing is like, I've been in your shoes, I understand, I've been there, done that. They're going to actually, so their edge is that their edge is that traditional PE funds are not looking at these at these companies as much

and they do not give a shit how the founder feels so that is an edge by itself just caring about the founder let's do this one do you know this guy? I love this guy

he just wrote this book for Stripe Press on bubbles. He's going to be a heretic on. Good dude. He's pro-bubble. Amazing. Who's not? Yeah. He believes that.

Just one more bubble. I actually told him about that on a call. Yeah. And he was an interesting theory that in fact it is not the Main Street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses. Because if you look at wealth inequality during financial collapses and recessions, wealth inequality decreases. Interesting.

Because on average, the main street investor invests on a much more regular cadence. It's the professional investor that's actually winning and losing more dramatically at scale. Yeah, it's very fascinating. Because the narrative is typically like, oh, the finance, the rich guys dumped on retail. But that's not really what happens

if you just look at the broader, broader picture. It's certainly true in the micro. Some people got dumped on. Some people dumped. But more broadly, the economic equality actually goes down during crashes. But I love this tweet. It didn't get very many views,

but I thought it was very interesting. It says, there's a dubious micro cap I've looked at that makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol the main active ingredient is caffeine so what they really sell is deconstructed for loco can't tell if that's a bull or bear when's the last time you had a four logo college damn i'm sorry yeah you haven't had opportunities since then maybe at the reticon we should crack we should crack open on stage yeah solano was telling me that he was like i showed him i showed him the

document and he was like he was like there's one problem i control f for four loco and it wasn't in this doc so we definitely have to get some real ones that's so great 100 i mean and we'll do an ad read for four loco yeah yeah it's perfect um yeah i i remember like you know when the four loco ban happened like you know everyone was kind of stockpiling like a case or two but the original four loco is like impossible to to acquire but it's the original yeah the original formula i mean it really is rare it's rarer than your than your you know first generation iphone that's on still in the box. Can you imagine driving through some forgotten town somewhere in America and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty? Thirsty.

I don't think thirst has anything to do with it. You're thirsty and you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're like, what is that? It's like it's not even refrigerated. It's like everything's lukewarm or whatever. You look back and you're like what what is that it's like it's not even refrigerated so it's like everything's lukewarm or whatever oh yeah it's dust okay you like scrape it off and it says like and it says expired in like 2008 yeah it was like 2009 right and you just immediately like start hitting it against your head. It's like water. It's like a mirage in the desert.

I don't have any negative memories of Four Loko. It certainly wasn't my go-to, but I think it was a great product and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence. Yeah. Well, what about Bowler Bear Case? I will tell you that this company is truly a micro-cap. I DMed him and asked him. It's about a $50 bear case? I will tell you that this company is truly a micro cap. I DMed him and asked him, and it's about a $50 million company.

It should be smaller. It should be smaller. Whatever their earnings are, it should be smaller. Yeah, I mean, the thing with the deconstructed Four Loko is, like, that already kind of exists, the Red Bull vodka, and then the Gentleman's Red Bull vodka, which, of course, is the espresso martini. And so the idea of mixing caffeine and alcohol, people do this regularly. They find ways to do it.

This is classic. The question is, like, yeah, will people really pick up on this? Because they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking but yeah i i there's another one of these hangover cures yeah that hangover cures or fixes are funny because tough business you're basically saying that i'm irresponsible but i'm responsible enough to buy a hangover cure these are great cups that's really tough yeah thank you uh yeah it's always hard to to. No, the real reason is you're saying you just poisoned yourself. Here's an antidote. Yeah. Antidotes don't promise that you're going to feel good.

They promise that you're going to live, you know? Okay. And so that's like the theory of an antidote. So, yeah, to me, you just commit to drinking is going to make you feel worse than you otherwise would. Temporarily, maybe better and then worse. So I think I've never invested in any of the companies that have – there's clearly demand. I have a friend who runs one that's doing pretty well.

They focus on weddings too. That's been a growth area because everyone's going to be drinking at the wedding. So if you can get into the wedding planner network then the wedding planner can present this as like oh this would be a lovely gift for everyone you put it in a little gift bag when they arrive they take it before they drink it's actually like a biotech company they have like really good science and so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol it really does work yeah z-biotics uh have you tried somebody was telling me that z-biotics is like i won't i don't want to misspeak.

And I don't want to talk poorly about anyone's for-profit enterprise. But yeah, no, I tried Z-Biotics and I was like, this didn't work. I'm very affected by alcohol that pretty much yeah the next time i drink alcohol and probably the only time in q4 will be at hereticon sure uh on stage yeah exactly um yeah yeah it is it is always hard because it's like if you have the forethought to think of taking a pre-alcohol uh hangover cure you also you have the forethought to think of taking a pre-alcohol hangover cure, you also might have the forethought to like mix in a glass of water or just drink glass. So it is hard.

Or you just eat a bigger dinner or drink more water. I mean, any business that's predicated. Or have your blood boy waiting at home. Like any business that's predicated on like you doing less of like the seven deadly sins is always tricky like you know the the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex that's going to struggle to me to me if i was going to invest in a um hangover cure it would be somebody recreating john mcafee's like protocol which is that no you should pull it and you should pull this up or put it on the screen or something um but his protocol is

like you know how he always like well whenever he does a video and he's no longer with us yeah but well allegedly allegedly allegedly yeah he's probably listening to this right now yeah um the he'll go on these rants where he's like how did i drink four bottles of gin a day for six years in a row and and you know still managed to hold the federal government hostage for 200 days in a row and he had the whole outline this like crazy biohacker stack that he's on that, like, is, like, helping with his liver and all this other stuff. And so he actually had it dialed. So, like, the McAfee stack is – if somebody wants to build that, I'll back that. I'll back that.

Because it clearly works. Like, your guy was, like, drinking, like – We're going to do a deep dive on the McAfee stack. He wasn't just partying. He was drinking. Like, he – He's, like, putting as much effort as brian johnson is into into surviving but also like into just but just refusing to not drink yeah yeah it's great

like the easiest win possible yeah how can i how can i survive well no probably like yeah would have still doing the single worst thing i could possibly do for my body yeah wow um what do you think of this? Dennis says, you're busy trying to get into founder mode while the 18-year-old Zoomer clipping Kai Sanat and Aiden Ross on TikTok has a higher ARR than your entire B2B SaaS startup.

Why'd you like this one so much? I mean, I just think that, I just think it's amazing if you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin I just think that it's amazing. If you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some 18-year-old would be making millions, he would be like, yeah, that was what I envisioned for America. It is interesting.

To go back to Jeremy Giffon. By the way, Giffon? Is it Giffon? No, I think that's Giffon Jeremy Giffon. By the way, Giffon is... Is it Giffon? No, I think that's Giffon. But it's so funny because his favorite business ever is like Lazard. Yeah. And Giffon just happens to feel like it's already in the same realm of... Is that the fun name? Giffon Capital? Giffon and Company.

And Company? There you go, and company there you go that makes sense well yeah I mean he told me this one interesting thing was like

he just like one of the highest signal you know data points that you can get on a founder

when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time they've never done a business

before is just show me a stripe account with money coming in yeah and simultaneously a high school report card that happened the same time like all i care about is like you made money while in high school yeah let me show you let me show you this picture and that is a great signal and and i think that it's interesting because this seems ridiculous, the 18-year-old Zoomer clipping Kaisen Ott and Aiden Ross clips on TikTok. But that 18-year-old Zoomer is probably the next great B2B SaaS founder. Like, probably.

Like, not unreasonable to back that person. You evolved from the lowest common denominator. Yeah, and that is going to get retconned from this low status clipping unreasonable to back that person you evolved from the lowest common denominator yeah and and and that is going to get retconned from this low status clipping aiden ross clips on tiktok to oh yeah i had a social media management company or oh yeah i i you know i had a no this is my first company okay let me see um yeah j man designs okay so literally when i was 12 i figured out that i could get skateboards manufactured in the Midwest for $17.50. Wow.

And I got my mom's help designing a graphic. And I raised the money from my aunt who gave me like 500 bucks for the first round. And I bought a bunch of boards. And my number one sales channel was friends birthday parties so when my friend's birthday was coming up I'd go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard yeah at $40 or $36 or whatever I was making like 50% margins I should have gone higher yeah a lot of like flexibility yeah yeah you got a zillow the show up. Actually, this is a $200 skateboard. It's a $200 skateboard. No, but that was like the first way that I made money that wasn't mowing lawns or whatever.

It's truly entrepreneurial. The formative experience for an entrepreneur, it's one thing to do a service like copywriting or any of these other graphic design. But buying a product for one price and all you do is resell it for something else. This is my first job too. My first entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it on eBay and being willing to ship internationally. And so figuring out that certain companies

with this very niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally. And so I would just be like, yeah, I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff. And a lot of people that wanted like the best audiophile gear would be like, dude, if you can buy this for me and I will pay the extra shipping costs and the premium to do it. And you just go figure all that stuff out. And it's only possible because like the internet yeah and fundamentally i still bring that up to founders when they're thinking they're like trying to over philosophize their businesses yep like are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price and if so how much more yeah and

if depending on the market, that's either going to lead to you creating a big business based on the margin profile or not. And so many people forget that, and I've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life. Fundamentally, it's about making something for one price, selling it for more than that. Yeah, just starting with a basic widgets business.

Somebody's going to clip this and be like, two guys discover business. Basically, here's the thing. So if I have this piece of paper, right, and I can get this paper for a dollar. Sell me this paper. Yeah. And you're willing to pay $2 for this

printout of a tweet. Yeah. What else do we have? We have a couple more things. I wanted to see, did you actually dig into this story about Marc Andreessen giving 50K in Bitcoin to an AI agent?

Yeah, I did. It was over, it was dramatized by an AI doomer. Yeah, dramatized by an AI doomer. Turns out like the money like went into an account and like was never actually touched. It's out like the money like went into an account like was never actually touched okay it's not like the AI was like I'm gonna use this yeah yeah

it's just sort of like mark sends it yep and then calling calling mark mark this reminds me somebody I was at dinner the other night and and somebody brought up Epstein and for some reason i was like unrelated and i called him i was like no but jeffrey would have why are you calling him jeffrey like what's wrong with you is there something that we need to know um yeah no but yeah i think just just there's going to be more examples of this where people are like, look, it's sentient. The problem with the truth terminal thing, I mean, it seems really cool. I hope that it's like real and someone's actually doing stuff.

It seems like a very avant-garde art project. But you never know, again, teleoperation. Is there a human in the loop here? So even with the – And there's an incentive to be like, oh, if people think this is an AI – They like it more because the bar is lower. It's like what we discussed the other day about the AI influencers are making 50K on Instagram, OnlyFans or whatever, and it turns out it's just a real woman.

But if a real woman says, oh, these are AI generated, people are like, oh, this is incredible. This is the best AI model I've ever seen. And there's going to be a lot of that, like faking it both in the teleoperation, both in this and just having a filter there. It is interesting. Are you familiar with like Move 37, this whole story? So when Google deep mined, Demis Hassidis was trying to beat Lee Sedol in Go,

the Go master. So computers had beaten chess and they'd become superhuman at chess, but Go was computationally much more complex. So something like instead of being trillion possible board positions that you could potentially search with a supercomputer, it's like quadrillion to quadrillion. So it's like impossible to just brute force it. But they applied deep learning, scale. they trained and they played you know billions of

simulated games and eventually the ai became very good everyone thought that lisa doll who was the world champion was going to wipe the floor and he wound up losing they made a whole documentary about it it was crazy um and in there there's this moment where they're playing and at move 37 the the computer deep mind places this piece like way off of the board where like no one not off the board but like it's a legal position it's just a very weird play like no one would ever do this no human would ever do this and and everyone was very confused they're like oh there's like a bug in the software like something's weird about this um uh but and and lisa doll like got up and was like what the fuck is going on like this is weird like i don't get this this is not how people play this game and that move wound up being critical and they won because of this move so it was like a true

discovery of like a novel strategy and that is like what we're looking for in intelligence when you say like an ai system is intelligent superhuman that's where we're getting there and with llms yeah the real the thing that would be interesting is if there was this ai like agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multi-sigs on solana oh yeah or something like that yeah again there was a rumor about that too but very unlikely but even even like so these move 37 type moments i i've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence a poem a paragraph something that feels like inspired and and like a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LLM.

We want to know that OpenAI has reached singularity until an agent built on the OpenAI platform buys a McLaren P1 to gain the favor of all men. P1 or F1? uh well i think he would he'd respect he'd respect both yeah but i don't know it's it's interesting it's definitely getting a response from the from the crazy ai doomers doomers doomers gonna doom but but i like that mark like you know yoloed 50k to But I like that Mark, like, you know, YOLO'd 50K to this project.

Like, that's fun. That's what he should be doing. Like, that's awesome. I'm excited. I agree just by an order of magnitude. Probably on the next run, you know. Did you read Sequoia's generated AI thing? Their whole paper?

Application layer is important. It's a bit too serious for our bones. I think so. No, it is. It's so long. It's one of those things where. Here's the funny thing. The only thing that I'll comment on that is it feels's a bit too serious for our bones i think so no it is it is so long but here's here's the funny thing the only thing that i'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago everybody was like the application doesn't matter building at the application layer is yeah rappers are stupid rappers are stupid and now it's like all in on rappers but then a year

from now i think it'll be back to oh you, I don't know, it's just funny to think that only six to 12 months ago, people were saying that software is dead or the end of software. So this report is coming within six months of the end of software. So who's right? Both of them are right.

That's honestly my opinion, is I think that long-term, Both of them are right. That's honestly my opinion is I think that long term both of them are right and that software is going to be massively disruptive, but there's still going to be massive value accrual to specific products. Yeah, I mean the computing hardware companies were valuable and the software built on top of them was valuable after the dot-com boom. And even the telecom companies were pretty valuable yeah and so the whole stack is valuable and there's probably value accruing all over the place it's great everywhere you look i mean it really is like it makes sense that like the value accrual wouldn't live just only one place of course there's going to be like

a winner but from a venture perspective everybody's incentive that anybody that's running a foundation model is incentivized to say we're going to capture all the value. We're going to do all these things that you say you're going to do. We're just going to do it innately through the core technology. And then everybody that wants to deploy money is is saying, yeah, you want it it's it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is gonna accrue to individual teams and products and apps and that because then you can YOLO yeah that's you know yeah the question is like and I don't know if they address this that much but disruptive innovation versus sustaining like will the existing,

because there's already a crop, there's already a, you know, a multi-billion dollar SaaS company in every major category. And so there's also now a YC company doing AI in that category as well. Is AI disruptive to those companies that are maybe only five, 10 years old

and doing well? Like, I mean, you know, Ramp is like, they're not being disrupted by AI. They're like the first one to implement it because like they're, they're still on the cutting edge. They still have the agile team. Right. Uh, and I, and I wonder, uh, yeah, how much of this is going to be completely new versus just, uh, the existing tech companies are able to just roll in I don't know keep an eye on it anything else there's always more technology always more technology I think we got through most of the tweets I have been using those meta glasses more. Oh, the video ones. Yeah, the video ones.

With the kids? With the kids. I went for a walk and had my hands full with dogs and babies, and it was great. I was able to take some photos. The photos are not that great, but the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the AI while you're walking around hands-free.

You just say, like, hey, meta, what year was the Declaration of independence signed or whatever and you're trying to disrupt ben yeah it just gives you it just gives you like little facts and stuff and it's like a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for like the random question yeah i think that's kind of cool getting you become the cell tower that yeah it was being transmitted i actually watched a huber human clip about that. Yeah. Yeah. And,

uh, and he had someone on who was like a brain scientist and who was basically like, it's chill. So, you know, I think, uh,

there's like, there's like the scientists agree. Now the bro scientists agree, but like, we got to come up with a new tier for like even more conspiratorial. Yeah. The tinfoil bros yeah yeah just the bros not bro scientists just bros don't even pretend to be a scientist

dude we should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here like just like a really really high high quality one anyway i think we crushed it we did all this stuff let's wrap there oh ending our potential vice president bragging about not knowing what a VC is the thing is here's the funny thing

politicians used to be able to travel around the country saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with zero consequences oh yeah and now every almost every single talk that a politician's ever going to have is going to be clipped and almost immediately published and even you know there's always they're always running the risk of being clipped out of context but tim walls can't it's you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that work, you know,

he's clearly pandering to a specific audience of being like, well, the funny thing with Tim Walls, the guy says he doesn't own any stocks or any financial instruments. He doesn't have retirement savings. He's just planning to live off of the government forever. Like he came out and said, yeah,

he has his pension from being in the government or whatever. He says he has no, he sold his house. He doesn't have any. He's all in. Like, the guy's all in. You've got to give him credit for that. But he has zero exposure to stocks, the market, or whatever.

So this is the guy. This is, you know, the, was it Dan Loeb who is tweeting and saying, like, is this the guy that we really want you know making decisions around you know the economy sure you know whatever but yeah tim wall is going and you know he's probably speaking to some group of like i don't know agriculture sure manufacturing manufacturing where the vcs aren't in that so apparently the guy i'm running against is a venture capitalist yeah i don't know what i don't even know what a venture capital is and it's like dude you can't even if you did even if that's true yeah if you want to win this race like why are you going and bragging about something there's literally a fairly large constituency of like VCS for for your campaign VCS for

Kamala yeah and then also it's like the Obama administration the the the organization that they met with outside the government more than any other during the administration was Google. The Democratic Party is well entrenched with tech and venture capital. This is well established. And so playing this like, oh, I don't even know what that is. Yeah, I feel like he's been – the last week has been interesting for him where there was a pic of – or not the picture the video of him going hunting i didn't even see that where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that

to sort of you know get the mail vote but back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun and then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is is like you're kind of alienating both crowds of guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is and i think that middle group that doesn't know what either is is not going to be that influential in your election but anyways that's enough politics um i'm looking forward to the next episode yeah me too thanks for listening thanks for listening